1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an inspection apparatus, inspection method, and program for determining whether or not a quality of a printed material is good.
2. Description of the Related Art
In many industries, particularly in the conventional printing industry, digital printing technology based on electrophotography or the like, which is called print on demand (POD), has been commonly used, and there is a need for efficiently producing a required amount of printed materials while maintaining their print qualities. Further, recently in most offices, there is a need for efficiently producing printed materials with a particular print quality.
In conventional image quality inspection of printed materials, however, operators generally inspect the printed materials by a visual check. Since the image quality inspection depends on sensor evaluation by operators, variations may be caused in inspection levels. Further, an inspection time depends on operator's experience, and due to dependence on manpower, there is a limit to the reduction of the inspection time.
Accordingly, apparatuses for inspecting a quality of a printed material have been invented which can maintain a particular inspection quality while reducing an inspection time.
For example, there is an apparatus for inspecting a quality of a printed material by scanning a printed material after completing the printing and comparing a print image on the printed material with a scan image obtained by scanning the printed material having the image printed thereon (see, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-94627). Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-94627 also discloses that detection of printing errors cancels printing. As the content of inspection, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-94627 discloses detecting blots, faintly printing, image void, density unevenness, color shift or the like on the printed image and determining whether there is any print error or input error associated with printed variable data.
In detecting color impression shift among inspection items, it is necessary to consider differences in color space characteristics between a print image and a scan image as well as scanning characteristics of a scanner used for scanning printed materials. Therefore, in the technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-94627, it is necessary to further perform color space conversion or color correction on the print image associated with printing.
Since detection of color shift requires additional processing as compared to detection of other items, the load on the inspection processing is increased. Therefore, one problem is that the processing speed associated with inspection by the inspection apparatus is affected and the costs of the inspection processing apparatus are raised.
In view of the above-described problem of the present invention, it is an object of the present invention to provide an image forming apparatus with image inspection functions which do not affect inspection processing speed and can achieve low costs by reducing the load on the inspection processing performed on the inspection items.